Saturday, January 30, 2010

Jews and Egypt

“Most historians today agree that, at best, the stay in Egypt and the exodus events occurred among a few families, and that their private story was expanded and ‘nationalized’ to fit the needs of theological ideology.” There is one later Egyptian documentation of such an event, by the high priest Manetho from the third century bc, which comes to a similar conclusion. As recounted by Lindemann, “the Jews had been driven out of Egypt because they, a band of destitute and undesirable immigrants who had intermarried with the slave population, were afflicted with various contagious diseases.” The Jews were thus expelled “for reasons of public hygiene.” In sum, “the account in Exodus was an absurd falsification of actual events, an attempt to cover up the embarrassing and ignoble origin of the Jews.”